Hasbro has been about as transparent as it gets in trying to replicate the multi-billion dollar success of Transformers with the company’s other properties, and it speaks volumes that the most successful by far have been the low budget Ouija films, leaving Battleship and G.I. Joe in the dust.
The latter is an especially egregious case seeing as Paramount has tried no less than three times to convince audiences that the militarized action franchise is something worth investing in, only to be given the box office equivalent of a middle finger each and every time. Battleship did at least manage to live up to expectations, but only because it proved to be a turgid flop.
From the second it was first announced that the quaint board game was being adapted as a $220 million sci-fi fantasy epic that features a hardy band of naval personnel fending off an alien invasion, it was predicted that director Peter Berg’s first foray into the land of colossal budgets was doomed to fail.
True to form, the admittedly eye-popping adventure struggled to a worldwide haul of only $330 million, leaving Hasbro and Universal a combined total of $150 million in the red. Ironically, Battleship comes across as the product of what would happen were Michael Bay’s Transformers and Pearl Harbor to have an ungodly child, which is nowhere near intended as a compliment.
Sweeping spectacle and things going boom are always going to draw in eyeballs on streaming, though, so not even the film’s status as a misguided and jaw-droppingly stupid exercise in one-dimensional banality can stop subscribers from pushing play. Per FlixPatrol, Battleship has powered full steam ahead on Rakuten to become one of the platform’s top-viewed features, even if we dare say it won’t be winning over many new converts.
